To understand what it is to be human, you have to understand how we engage with the material world.
[In our course video, Dr Elizabeth Ewart (School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography)]
Professor Dan Hicks (Professor of Contemporary Archaeology) writes in his 'Letter to a Young Archaeologist' for the Council of British Archaeology website:
Archaeology isn’t the study of stopped clocks. We don’t encounter an archaeological site as if it were a frozen moment of time like Pompeii after the eruption of Vesuvius. Archaeology is the study of human endurance. The historian rewrites the past but the archaeologist works with that kind of memory that can come about when there is nobody alive who can do the remembering any longer, and the work of memory is taken on by things, landscapes, buildings, traces and ruins.
